ABSTRACT
Within William Shakespeare’s great body of work, the role of mothers comes as a great surprise. In this chapter, the author focuses on the four categories of mothers in Shakespeare’s plays: magical mothers, mourning mothers, mothers absent and present. In both The Comedy of Errors and The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare either removes the mothers before the play begins or early in the first act. He uses magic to return these absent mothers in the final scene. There are plays with adult characters that make no mention of the mother, while the father figures prominently, as in King Lear. There are three plays where a mother is physically present that deserve special attention: the early drama The Tragedy of King Richard III, the Hamlet of Shakespeare’s maturity, and the later drama of Coriolanus. The Tragedy of King Richard III was written between 1592 and 1593.
